In a market that's going sideways, it can become quite frustrating to figure out what the trend is. More often than not, there are certain sectors that perform well and certain sectors that don't. But it's also important to identify other avenues of investment that could generate good returns over a period of time.

Today we're exploring one such theme in the form of REITs. Read on, to learn more.

Did The Economist just call the bottom for the market?

Take a look at the latest cover.

They're asking the question, "What would happen if the markets crashed?"

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

When investing in the stock market, we always want to approach it as a market of stocks.

Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks showing leadership and trending higher.

We may have to look harder to identify them depending on current market conditions… but there are always stocks that are going up.

The same can be said for weak stocks. Regardless of the environment, there are always stocks that are going down, too. 

We already have multiple scans focusing on stocks making all-time highs, such as Hall of Famers, Minor Leaguers, and the 2 to 100 Club. We filter these universes for stocks that are exhibiting the best momentum and relative strength characteristics. 

Clearly, we spend a lot of time identifying and writing about leading stocks every week, via multiple reports.

But, now, we’re also highlighting lagging stocks on a recurring basis.

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We debuted a new scan recently- The Outperformers.

The Outperformers is our newest scan that pinpoints the very best stocks in the market. It’s the fastest, easiest way to find quality names that are primed for major moves.

The goal is that as the market rally progresses, the sector rotation within the market will reflect in this scan. So while our Top/Down Analysis helps us with the broader view of the market, this Bottom/Up scan makes sure that we catch the slightest change in sentiment.

From the desk of Steven Strazza @Sstrazza and Grant Hawkridge @granthawkridge

In April 2020, crude oil traded below zero and marked the perfect capitulation event for a number of trends.

Around the very same time, both commodities and stocks bottomed and kicked off major rallies.

Until recently, commodities had underperformed stocks for about a decade. To make matters worse, they were moving lower on an absolute basis for most of that time as well. 

Not only have commodities started to trend higher on an absolute basis again. They're also undergoing a reversal in their relative trend with stocks and other alternatives.

We’ve been clear about our bullish position as we’ve discussed the potential for a new commodity supercycle for over a year. 

Now, we want to take that thesis one step further as the evidence is building in favor of commodities experiencing a sustained period of outperformance relative to stocks.

To best take advantage of this trend, we want to be overweight commodities and commodity-related stocks.

Let’s...

Music week continues here at Allstarcharts with a little R.E.M. today.

Yesterday we were wondering "What's Going On?", to quote the great Marvin Gaye.

So on today's note, we'll try to answer the question: Is this, in fact, The end of the world as we know it?

And for me, the answer is a big fat NO if these two indexes are above their 2018 highs:

Today we're taking a pick from the Consumer Durables sector. There's been a slight pick-up in activity along with a big base breakout. Which stock is it?

Let's take a look at the trade for this week!

From the desk of Steve Strazza @sstrazza

This is one of our favorite bottom-up scans: Follow the Flow. In this note, we simply create a universe of stocks that experienced the most unusual options activity — either bullish or bearish… but not both.

We utilize options experts, both internally and through our partnership with The TradeXchange. Then, we dig through the level 2 details and do all the work upfront for our clients. Our goal is to isolate only those options market splashes that represent levered and high-conviction, directional bets.

We also weed out hedging activity and ensure there are no offsetting trades that either neutralize or cap the risk on these unusual options trades.

What remains is a list of stocks that large financial institutions are putting big money behind… and they’re doing so for one...

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza.

Welcome back to our latest Under the Hood column, where we'll cover all the action for the week ended February 4, 2022. This report is published bi-weekly and rotated with our Minor Leaguers column.

What we do here is analyze the most popular stocks during the week and find opportunities to either join in and ride these momentum names higher, or fade the crowd and bet against them.

We use a variety of sources to generate the list of most popular names.

There are so many new data sources available that all we need to do is organize and curate them in a way that shows us exactly what we want: a list of stocks seeing an unusual increase in investor interest.

Watch this video for a behind-the-scenes look at our process.

Whether...

Whenever I'm trying to figure out what's going on, I can't get that Marvin Gaye song out of my head.

But the tl;dr of it is that US large-cap stock indexes are holding support. So far, anyway.

We laid out the key levels a couple weeks back.

But also notice how we've been seeing more strength around the world, with the US acting as one of the laggards. It probably has something to do with all that growth exposure in a lot of US large-cap indexes.

Most other countries don't have that.

Here you can see the Dow Jones Composite Index holding that key 11,200 area. This is a good representation of what we're seeing in a lot of other major indexes and sectors:

This week I had a great conversation with Jeremy Schwartz on the Behind The Markets Podcast on SiriusXM Radio.

Jeremy and I have been through a few cycles throughout our careers and probably understand the weightings of Indexes and ETFs better than most investors. Which was a big point I was trying to make: Understand what you own. You need to know what's inside of these things, and more importantly, what's not.

There's a lot going on in today's market but I tried to really focus in on the primary trends and where I think we're going this year.

Last time we did this I got to go down to the studio at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. But the weather was bad so we recorded remotely. Hopefully I can make it down there soon and we can do it live from the University once again.

Either way, I think we hit on a bunch of key points on this episode.

Hope you enjoy!

From the desk of Steve Strazza @Sstrazza

For most of my career, I've listened to fundamental analysts make the argument that investors should be overweight international stocks because they're "cheaper" than US stocks.

This has been the case for a long time now, and it's merely a function of the fact that there are far more value and cyclical stocks overseas.

But, since value stocks have been out of favor for so long, ex-US stocks have severely underperformed domestic markets.

Growth has been the place to be for the last decade, and for this reason the alpha has been with the tech-heavy US stock market over its global peers.

But now that we're seeing the tide shift in favor of value, we're also seeing early signs of reversals in the US versus the world relative trends.

There's still more work to be done before we have conviction that we want to favor international stocks, but the weight of the evidence continues to move in that direction.

In today's post, we'll discuss what we're seeing from these relative trends and then go over some areas of the global equity market that are likely to benefit from the value over...